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Saving Emails from Airmail as Tasks in Todoist

• Federico

Among the new features in Airmail 1.5 (which I detailed on MacStories earlier this week), there is a new integration to add a Workflow step to any custom action. This new Workflow action makes it possible to share details of email messages – including body text and a callback URL – with an existing workflow, which will parse the data received from Airmail as input.

To give you an example of what this powerful integration can let you build using Airmail and Workflow, I created a custom action to turn email messages into Todoist tasks with rich cards that embed message-specific details as well as a link to re-open the message in Airmail even after it’s been archived.

The new ‘Send to Workflow’ action in Airmail works by letting you choose which parts of a message you want to pass to a workflow as text. Under the hood, these bits of text are encoded in a URL scheme that launches Workflow and triggers a specific workflow to be run. However, because there’s a user interface to build custom actions in Airmail, you never see the underlying URL scheme and you don’t have to take care of encoding text yourself; you just flip some switches to tell Airmail which details of a message to share with Workflow.

By default, different bits of a message are sent to Workflow with a newline as the separator. To have more control over automation and more precisely organize the bits of text generated by Airmail, you can define a custom separator that will be placed in between items. I recommend doing this if you don’t want to split text at newlines and want to automate messages that span multiple paragraphs.

For my custom Todoist action, I wanted to be able to save emails as tasks that contained the subject, the sender’s name and email address, and a preview of the body text. I also wanted a way to quickly re-open the message from Todoist without having to snooze it in Airmail or keep it pinned in my inbox. With custom actions in Airmail 1.5, all of this is fairly easy to assemble.

After selecting the portions of a message I needed in Airmail, I created a workflow with ‘Split Text’ as the first action and put the custom separator I entered in Airmail in the dedicated field. With the custom separator, Workflow will keep new lines and will instead split the text into multiple items every time the custom separator occurs in the text shared by Airmail. This way, the workflow turns the incoming URL scheme from Airmail into a list of text items that always have the same index position.

For example, the sender’s email will always be at Index 1 in the list, while the subject line will be at Index 3. Workflow makes it easy to extract items from a list at a specific index: all we need to do is save the list to a variable then iterate over it with a ‘Get Item from List’ action, save the result to a separate sub-variable, and repeat the process for every message parameter shared by Airmail.

At the end, it’s all a matter of filling Workflow’s ‘Add Todoist Item’ action with variables previously extracted from the email message. In my case, I used the subject and message link with a Markdown syntax to make the task’s title tappable in Todoist (tapping it will open the message directly in Airmail so I can read it again and reply to it), while everything else (sender details and body text) goes into the note field of the task. The date, as you can imagine, gets typed into a native ‘Date’ action in Workflow, which supports natural language input and gets automatically translated to the format that the Todoist API requires.

Thanks to this custom action, every time I come across a message in Airmail I want to save for later, I tap a button (or swipe the message) and Workflow launches with a text field that asks me to enter a due date. That’s it. I don’t have to confirm any other message detail and I don’t have to interact with a Todoist task entry interface; Workflow can parse message data sent by Airmail and talk to the Todoist API to save a task.

This has become my favorite way to turn email messages into tasks, which lets me process my inbox more easily and retain information about original messages in the body of a task.

You can get the workflow here (for the Airmail custom action, you’ll have to recreate it manually based on my screenshots).

Convert Mail Rich Text to Markdown

Here’s a simple workflow I had to put together this week for a basic task that isn’t natively supported on iOS. This week’s Home screen guest, James Thomson, sent me his post as rich text over email. Rich text is notoriously flaky on iOS (multiple apps have different implementations of the framework), and I wanted to convert everything to Markdown while keeping James’ formatting and links intact without having to re-add them manually.

Thankfully, Workflow comes with a built-in action to convert rich text to Markdown. To turn James’ post into plain text, I had to copy rich text from Mail (one of the apps that keeps formatting when copying rich text to paste it somewhere else), then use ‘Get Clipboard-Make Markdown from Rich Text’ in Workflow to get the previously copied rich text, convert it, and save it as output.

This way, I didn’t lose any formatting from the original piece and I was able to import it into Ulysses with Workflow’s own ‘New Ulysses Sheet’ action, which accepts Markdown input to create a new document in the text editor.

You can get the workflow here.

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Member Requests

• Federico

It sounds like you should consider an integrated solution to save some time during the scanning and renaming steps. As long as you keep scanning independent from renaming a file, I don’t see how we could speed up the process through automation. Instead, I would suggest using a scanner app that lets you rename a file quickly as soon as the picture is taken and while the document is uploading. Scanbot is a great choice for this as it lets you rename documents easily and it comes with automatic uploads to copy a file to a cloud service right after a document has been generated.

Faster scanning and renaming, however, still wouldn’t provide a solution to the problem of importing a file into DEVONthink and deleting the original from Dropbox. You’re still going to have to manually delete and import the file into DEVONthink, but we can automate at least one part of this process.

By combining the ‘Get Files from Dropbox’ and ‘Delete Files from Dropbox’ actions in a workflow, you should be able to fetch an existing file from Dropbox, save it to a variable, delete the file, and import it into DEVONthink using the Open In menu of iOS. This way, you’ll have to choose a file manually from the Dropbox picker in Workflow, but you’ll save time in the deleting and importing steps.

• Federico

I am not aware of RSS apps with email-like snoozing features, but we can get creative with Workflow and put together a system that uses the action extension and Reminders to schedule an article for later.

Here’s my idea: from an RSS reader, we can share the URL to a story with the Workflow extension, which will get the URL, the title of the story, save both to two variables, and bring up a Reminders action. With Workflow’s native support for natural language input in dates, we can schedule a reminder containing the link to the story we want to read later using a simple syntax such as “today at 5 PM”. Workflow will then save the reminder, which will propagate to other devices signed into the same iCloud account in the background.

At due time, iOS will bring up a notification for the reminder, which we can open to find the article’s link in the note field and tap it to view it in Safari.

It would have been nice if Workflow supported a “Schedule Notification” action to save a local notification with a user-defined payload for later (imagine saving a link that gets turned into a rich article preview by Workflow), but this workaround based on Reminders gets the job done. If you want an easier way to open the URL from the notification itself, you could also consider Due and its excellent Workflow integration.

You can get the workflow here.

• Federico

This can be done with a workflow that saves the contents of the clipboard to a variable as soon as it starts running and then fetches and reformats the current date.

Here’s the trick: we can’t directly inject content into the clipboard, which means we have to fetch the clipboard, save it as a variable, put together some new text, and then re-save it as an altered version to the clipboard. In this case, after saving the clipboard to a variable and using ‘Date-Format Date’ to extract the current date, we can use a ‘Text’ action to put the date above the Clipboard variable and then use ‘Copy to Clipboard’ again to end up with a date string prepended to the Fact of the Day, ready to be pasted in Drafts.

You can get the workflow here.

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